Daughter of the Man Who Saved The World
by rallamajoop
Summary: Videl has had plenty of practice being sensible about the bizarre.


Videl has had plenty of practice being sensible about the bizarre. For example, when she was nine years old, her father not only saved the world, but did so on national TV.

Then he did it again, and again as it was repeated ad-infinitum on news specials around the world and at Satan fan-club gatherings for years afterwards. The frenzy surrounding a genuine world-saving hero was the sort of bandwagon everyone wanted a ride on. Renaming the city in his honour had been made virtually meaningless by the end of the two weeks it took the council to get around to doing it, as by then virtually every available outdoor surface had been plastered with pictures of Mr Satan's toothy face. From Videl's side it was all really incredible and absolutely fantastic and guaranteed she'd be an instant celebrity at every school she ever attended, but deep down inside part of her was completely under-whelmed. Every nine year-old knows they have the best (or, dependant on what they got for their last birthday, worst) Daddy in the world; besides, Videl saw her Dad on TV fighting people in silly costumes all the time.

When she was ten, Mr Satan signed his third sponsorship deal for painkillers ("Go Right to the Source of the Stomach Ache so You Too can Save the World") and they moved into the mansion, where the situation only got worse. On entrance, guests were treated to the sight of six giant plasma screens placed a strategic locations throughout the hallway set to play the Cell Game footage on infinite loop (the real footage, that is, not the dramatic wire-fu recreation, or even the selectively reedited version with the obnoxious techno backing track, in which Mr Satan spent rather less time crouched over with a stomach-ache). This stayed there until she was ten and a half, at which point the display was shortened and, after her father had been forced to repeat to Videl his explanation of why they were showing two hours of footage of Cell ignoring their world hero completely, removed altogether. In the meantime, Videl usually took the back way in.

In fact, by the time Videl was twelve the video had been playing in the background of a quite significant fraction of her formative years, and she'd well and truly learned to tune it all out. Videl grew up believing a) that people could fly if they knew the right trick, b) that there was a golden-haired boy out there somewhere who did, and c) that saving the world was just one of those things Dads _do_.

Starting martial arts classes the same year was a depressingly public exercise, requiring rather more inspirational speeches about things like stubbed toes on her father's part than Videl thought really necessary. It was more or less accepted by all parties that Videl would follow in his footsteps, or at least whatever portion of the way was allowed by the recent shortage of bored psychopathic bio-androids out to destroy civilisation for amusement. Taking those first steps was a more complicated matter. A depressingly large fraction of her potential challengers refused to so much as spar against her, some even up to half a dozen years her senior (though the thought of what her father might do if they did her any damage might have played a part in a number of such cases). A number scarcely smaller would come from miles around just to challenge her to one match.

Stubbed toes were not the worst she dealt with that year, nor the next, but by the time she started high school, the proportion of challengers falling into the second category had been encouragingly reduced.

When Videl was thirteen, there was a nasty incident following one or two surprise challenges too many involving some bushes on her way to school, a member of the paparazzi and a lot of intentions being grossly misinterpreted. On the upside, the media got the message, and she was largely left alone for a good while after that. In the spectra of the world famous there's a fairly narrow band between the attention whores, the miserably fed up and the reclusive, but Videl could have marked it out down to the centimetre.

When Videl was fourteen, a man with a gun broke into her school and took her whole classroom hostage. The minor matter of her class including the daughter of the man who'd saved the world escaped his attention, which was probably fortunate for a number of reasons. After the first ten minutes or so of mad panic, during which a lot of demands were made, some light fittings broken and several teachers ran around like decapitated poultry things calmed down fairly quickly. By the time the police showed up and a TV crew parked itself on their front lawn, it had all proven far more tedious than it was frightening. In retrospect though, given the ratio of waiting to action, it must be allowed that the media timed it all beautifully. It was just as the reporter was telling everyone that Mr Satan was personally on his way - speaking over footage of the culprit posing menacingly for the capsule-camera hovering outside the window - that Videl took the opportunity to jump her desk and drop kick the man neatly in the back of the head.

Mr Satan, on arrival several minutes later, reportedly spent fifteen seconds panicking about her safety, two minutes discovering her to be fine, then nearly half an hour boasting in front of the camera. The whole affair made the evening news, but Videl had homework to do. Anyway, going through all that once in twenty-four hours should surely be enough for anyone. (School was inexplicably cancelled the following day, however, so she did eventually agree to spend some of it curled up on the couch next to her Dad, and okay, maybe they watched the tape through a couple of times.)

When she was fourteen and a half, the police made one of their bi-monthly appearances at her door asking for Mr Satan's help. By unfortunate coincidence, Mr Satan had a prior engagement - the sort involving several-thousand seat stadium full of fans and a hefty appearance fee and hence unaccountably difficult for him to get out of, as he explained with no little bluster. But he would not send them away unassisted! (as was usually the case when such conflicts arose) He declared, bringing a hand down heavily on Videl's far shoulder. His only daughter had distinguished herself in just such an incident only short months before! She was someday to become the world's second greatest champion, he assured them, and now the time had come for her to show the world something-or-other, blah-blah-blah-blah. (The last part was never particularly clear, as it was just at this stage his helicopter landed, and the speech finished over the sound of rotor blades as the world's greatest champion was hastily whisked away to make his two o'clock appearance.)

Videl, who had of course been brought up on video recordings of Mr Satan's speeches about civic duty and using one's powers in the good of mankind, having been recorded at any number of similar incidents in the past (usually with some bruised and trussed up criminal on prominent display in the background), agreed to help out amicably. Videl's presence on the crime scene did not have quite the same psychological impact as her father's, however, with all the sudden aches and cramps and impromptu speeches removed from the process, the police had to admit the whole operation went through with far less fuss than usual.

The next time the police showed up at her door it all happened again. The third time it happened they gave her a pager. By the sixth time the TV crews had all more-or-less learned she was far more interested in getting back to class than giving statements, and life, as much as life ever did, settled down for a while

There were periods in Videl's fifteenth year when she was actually able to forget her father saved the world, sometime for as long as a few hours at a time. It was during this year that she set a record at roughly five hours and twenty-four minutes spent without being once reminded about world champions of any kind; the majority of which was spent mid-way through a particularly memorable trigonometry exam. This record would eventually be broken at the age of nineteen (not to mention again, and quite thoroughly, during an miserable period spent in labour at twenty-one), but would nonetheless remain an impressive personal best for a good long while.

This was also the year her father gave up the last remaining pretence of such tedious activities as training or showing up to help the police in favour of fan-club appearances and female company. Hero-fatigue aside, Videl had to seriously question whether she'd have preferred the man to act a little more like a world saviour and a little less like her single, middle-aged Dad.

Sixteen was rather more eventful year.

When Videl was sixteen, a golden-haired warrior wearing an Orange Star High badge was sighted disarming a band of bank robbers. This occurred roughly sixty seconds before she ran into a boy fitting the same description leaving the scene, and about half an hour before the same boy showed up for his first day of school. Trigonometry aside, basic math is not something that had ever given Videl any difficulty.

The boy's name was Son Gohan. He was friendly if a little shy, worryingly good at baseball, had the odd habit of dressing up like a lost sentai reject and lecturing people about the wrongs of various minor misdemeanours and quivered in fear of what his mother would do to him should his report cards ever come back featuring anything lower than an A. He was also the son a past Tenkaichi Budokai champion, was strong enough to crush a handgun with his bare hands and could demonstrate any number of 'tricks' that could have tested the depth to which her father's jaw could unhinge, should he ever get to see them. What this impressive list of talents lacked, however, was even a fraction of the cunning required to convincingly maintain a secret identity - let alone two variations thereof in the same a week - and if he thought for a moment that she of all people was going to just let something like this go, he had another thing coming.

Videl has gone many happy years classifying what she did next as not so much blackmail as a friendly lesson on what happens when one tries to keep secrets as big as his without putting much thought into the process. Besides, in the long run it could certainly only have sped up the inevitable.

It was at sixteen that Videl learned a) that people really could fly if they learned about Ki control, b) that there was a golden-haired boy out there who was a lousy liar but still the most useful instructor she would ever have, and c) that her Dad really hadn't had anything much to do with saving the world after all. It didn't require too great a shift of her world view. In fact, somewhere in the middle of a lot of trouble and pain and Gohan-kun rushing off to save the world all over again, several loose flying pieces of Videl's life finally slotted into place.

Sixteen was also the year the world ended, was forcibly restarted up again and her Dad (sorta) saved it for real. It was the year she discovered Kami-sama was actually four feet tall, bald and green, died, met Enma-daiou and came back to life to discover that a giant pink blob called Buu would be moving into her house (though this last part also meant she finally got part ownership of a puppy and so was tolerated with minimal complaint). Finally, sixteen was the year she started dating Son Gohan.

Of course, given Videl's track record, even the happily-ever-after part of the story could hardly have come down to a simple walk off into the sunset – not when it involved settling down with a super-powered alien who treated death like a revolving door. Fortunately, 'girl calmly, happily marries high-school sweetheart' was a story not even Mr Satan's daughter could turn into a media event, and between her father's (now incredibly ironic) requirement that she not date anyone who couldn't defeat him and Chi-Chi's… er, old-fashioned awareness of money matters, their respective children's change in status went down with remarkably few explosions. This much had to be said though – that as much as she would later come to know and generally like most of Gohan's family and friends and the life they all led, they certainly put his peculiarities in perspective.

Still, at the end of the day, with the _real_ daughter-of-the-man-who-saved-the-world asleep in her lap, Videl would have to admit that a life of the bizarre is nothing she hasn't learned to appreciate.


End file.
